Review Summary:

One of the latest trends in the Mac App Store are numerous writing apps which are made to offer you a distraction-free environment. These applications certainly can’t beat Word or Pages in terms of advanced features and general usability, but they are made to help your focus on your writing and become more productive.

Some people really like these applications, and I am certainly one of them. Since I spend a lot of my time writing on a daily basis, I’ve realized that an application like this can help me write much more in terms of quantity, for the same time period before. On the other hand, there are some people which are simply too much used to Word and Pages, and for them it can be too difficult to adapt to this completely minimalist environment. The bottom line is that applications like iA Writer are extremely popular, so I guess that the majority really sees all those advantages of these writing apps.

In this article we are bringing you yet another completely minimalist writing app, which I believe is the perfect choice for those who would like to try an application like this, for the first time. The reason for my opinion is that this application is completely free of charge and offers just enough features to get your started. It is called Imagine, and could be found at the Mac App Store.

Imagine comes with a brutally minimalistic interface, since it basically offers only a blank sheet of paper, which is a formatted page with a title and the body for your text. You can use Imagine’s Preferences to set up default font and size, as well as the color of your paper, or a background. Even though this might seem a bit unusual, an option to choose color of a background is important since that color will constantly shine upon you from the monitor screen and it can be heavy on your eyes. So you can choose the one that suits you the best.

While writing in Imagine, you can press CMD+Alt+T so that a small toolbar can come out. It will be positioned at the bottom of a window and will offer you a word count as well as a few basic formatting options like bold, italic, underline and such. Those are actually all the text editing options you can find in Imagine.

As you can assume, Imagine supports OS X’s full-screen mode, and that’s where this application really shines. You will be left only with your text, and you can completely focus only on your writing. When you choose to save your text, you can save it as .txt and .rtf format, and those are the only two possibilities. It would be nice to see some a bit more advanced exporting features, but this is not really a limitation since this application doesn’t offer markdown syntax or any of those advanced writing techniques.

In case you’re searching for a distraction-free writing application, Imagine is the perfect choice. It can lead you to some more advanced and paid writing apps which will unlock a whole new world of advanced techniques, so it’s important to take one step at a time.

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